I remember how nervous I was when I drove across Newfoundland in the late 1980s to take up my first position as a print-media reporter.
It was a long distance from St. John’s, the capital city where I lived most of my life up to then, to Baie Verte in the far northern part of the province.
It took more than eight hours of driving to get there (my mom cooked me a Cornish hen to eat along the way) and I quickly realized that trips back home were not likely to be very frequent, particularly in the winter months.
I arrived in Baie Verte, a mining and fishing community of about 3,000 people that is also the service centre for dozens of other mostly fishing communities in the region, and headed to the bed and breakfast where my publishing company had rented me a room until I got set up.
I was surprised that the company hadn’t sent anyone to show me around town and meet some of the more prominent people that I would likely soon be interacting with pretty regularly, but so it was, so I just dealt with it.
I drove around town on my first day of work visiting businesses and town hall to introduce myself, and most people were pretty interested in the fact that a “townie”, as people from the city were called, had joined their ranks.
They were a little standoffish, but curious, at first with this stranger that had showed up as, being small, it was a pretty tight-knit community whose members had known each over many generations.
But, as Newfoundlanders are well known for their friendliness, it didn’t take them long to accept me and made me welcome in the town.
I rented a house close to the harbour where the fishermen tied up their boats and they had to pass by my abode on their way home after a long day plying their trade, and that’s when I came to realize for the first time what it meant to be part of such a close community.
There was no property crimes that I can recall and nobody ever bothered to lock their doors, so, after just a few weeks of living in my home, I started coming home from work to find exquisitely fresh cod, salmon, flounder, hake, or whatever the fish of the day was, sitting in my kitchen sink.
I never ate so well, and I was given so much fish that the deep freeze in my house filled quickly and I loaded up any friends and family that occasionally visited with the overload, much to their delight.
But lobster season proved interesting than the rest.
I remember coming home one day to find four large lobsters that had been at the bottom of the sea just a few hours earlier sitting in my sink.
Being so fresh made them still very feisty, and then I noticed that my new fishermen friends hadn't banded their claws as they usually did with lobsters after they got back to shore so those who bought them after they reached the markets didn’t get their fingers snapped off.
It occurred to me that my new friends decided to have some fun with the writer townie that had showed up on their doorsteps, who they knew had absolutely no experience in any kind of fishery other than some trout fishing.
So I boiled a big pot of water and put on a pair of gloves and tried my best to catch the back ends of the obviously deeply perturbed crustaceans before they could catch my fingers in their strong claws.
But when I went after one, another of them would jump up with it claws snapping.
This dance went on for about five minutes before I noticed two of my new fishermen buddies standing outside the window watching me bounce around the sink with great hilarity.
They came in the kitchen (because of course the door was open) and quickly and effortlessly caught each of the lobsters and banded their claws, and I invited them to stay for a lobster meal, which was delicious beyond belief.
Unfortunately, migration out of that province continues to be steady after the collapse of the cod fishery in the 1990s, but many, if not most, of those from the outports are reluctant to leave and I can understand that after my three years in Baie Verte.
There are many days that I wish I had never left myself.
